My Love Cannot Save You

Last night I had a dream that you were missing.

For three days, we searched and I clawed at the side of an FBI agent who told me you were gone forever. I fell to my knees on the porch and screamed and I woke your Pa up with my cries.

“Babe?” He rubbed my arm as I whimpered my way back into the real world, out of the terror of night. Sleep evaded me then and I stared at the ceiling thinking of every mother who cannot find her child. Every mother who has lost a part of her heart and soul. I prayed for mothers who claw at the side of government agents who cannot find their children. I prayed for mothers whose children were taken during the night in Nigeria, for the mothers whose children never returned home from school, for the mothers at the border who were separated, never to see their son or daughter’s face again. Every mother who wakes from the terror of night to the gnawing ache of the day. 

--

We are on the cusp of the middle school years. This September, we launched our oldest into the waters teeming with social media, polarizing politics, confusing sexual ethics, peer pressure, a more demanding academic life, new friendships, all sorts of home lives converging in a public space where there is no normal, no baseline, no assumed morality. 

And she could not be more excited. 

The mothers who have gone before me give me mixed messages depending on their experience. I’m listening, of course. I want to hear how you handled those late-night conversations that erupted with emotion. How you responded when they decided you were too embarrassing to be seen with at school. (My answer: keeping singing loudly at drop off because she’ll survive that.) 

What you did with that one “friend’ who isn’t really a friend but your kid doesn’t seem to realize that yet. How you handled the questions that have no clear answer. How to prep your kid for all of those unseen things, temptations, moments that are racing toward you down the road and you just close your eyes, whisper desperate prayers, hoping against all hope that you’ve given them enough tools to respond with wisdom. 

—

I will screw this up. It’s inevitable. I’m human. I tell her this.

I’ll hold her tight and hug her until she’s squirming out of my arms. I rattle off the list of ways to live and how loved she is while we’re in the school drop-off line, fighting back my anxiety that what if this is the last time I talk to her?

The world feels so broken and unpredictable and no one can promise me that it isn’t.

I kiss her at bedtime and think of the 12-year-old kid who died in his sleep suddenly and no one knew why.

I love you I love you I love you

and my love cannot save you.

At the end of each day, I pull her into a long hug. I cup her face between my hands. “We love you, always, no matter what,” I say. She rolls her eyes.

“Mom, I know.”

“God loves you. He sees you. He knows more about you than you know about yourself.” She nods. We wrestle with doubts and fears, questions that won’t be wrapped up before a goodnight kiss. These years feel like a tightrope walk of faith, holding tightly to the promise that God knew her before I did. He crafted her edges, her weaker spots, her strengths, her need for Him.

I think of Mary the mother of Jesus as she watched him on the cross. How he suffered and died and she stood off to the side knowing full well her love could not save him.

But most assuredly, His love could save her.

“Parenting is the most frightening thing I’ve ever done,” I told my husband as we drifted off to sleep last night. Maybe that’s why my dreams were riddled with fear. Why I felt like I lost her despite all my attempts to do it right. Why I remembered that my love cannot save her, but His can.

—-

Today we listened to Weezer covers of 80’s hits. I pointed out the sunrise as we drove to school — lavender and lemon sky against the rusted and harvested earth. She squeaks out a low-key embarrassed “I love you too” in the parent drop-off line and I’ll take it because I don’t need her expressions to reciprocate mine. My Father taught me how to love this way.

I can’t give a downpayment on any of the promises but I know the Promise Holder. I can’t promise each sunrise but I know the one who holds the universe at its edges and shakes it new every day. I can’t prevent her pain or her tears, but I know the One who wraps his arms around her and catches every tear in a bottle, present and attentive to each one. My love cannot save her, but my love can teach her how to read a compass, how to lift her sails, how to find safe harbor and there on the open sea, my Love will meet her, catch her, hold her all the way home.